


Christmas in Kiev and Other Annual Disasters

by SylvanWitch



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, please read the notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 11:58:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Every December 24th thereafter, a bottle of 100-proof, bottom-shelf vodka shows up on Phil’s desk.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas in Kiev and Other Annual Disasters

**Author's Note:**

> There is a brief scene of non-graphic rape involving an underage victim. There is implied non-consensual underage sex in Clint's past. There is no non-consensual sex of any kind described in detail. The graphic sex in this story is entirely and enthusiastically consensual.
> 
> There is also one scene that is violent in nature, though I wouldn't describe it as "graphic," which is why it doesn't make the warnings up top.
> 
> Finally, this story is AU for the MCU, and it is a stand-alone, not at all related to my _Proving the Exception_ series. No Soul Bond here.

Clint Barton’s first Christmas with Phil Coulson is spent on a mission in Kiev.

They don’t talk about Kiev.  Ever.

But every December 24th thereafter, a bottle of 100-proof, bottom-shelf vodka shows up on Phil’s desk with a note:  “Thought you’d like to strip the enamel in your bathroom, sir.”

On Barton’s bunk at HQ, the ubiquitous brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide appears mysteriously.  “For that little hygiene issue, Barton.”

That’s all.

*****

Christmas number three is in sunny Medellin.

Phil skips the peroxide, pours local hooch over the deep gash in Clint’s shoulder, listens to him hiss and pant, and braces Clint with his free hand.  The muscles of Clint’s good shoulder bunch and ease under his grip.  Clint’s skin is slick with sweat, hair plastered to his head, face a bruised wreck, and Phil has a sudden recognition that Clint’s still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

It’s not a discovery he’s comfortable revisiting in a shack on the edge of perdition where an extraction team may or may not find them in time.

With hands that don’t betray a hint of the hesitation he feels, Phil  threads thirty-pound fishing line through the edges of the wound with a fishhook he’d honed to fine sharpness, filing away the barb with a patience he didn’t feel.

Biting insects swarm the sweating edges of his eyes, but he doesn’t blink, even when one burrows in and takes hold, growing monstrous in his near sight as he concentrates on tying off the last stitch.

He startles when Clint reaches up with his good hand, the one not sticky with his own blood, and wipes the pest from his eye, thumb surprisingly gentle, his own eyes glassy as the fever of infection sets in.

When Phil blinks at last, eyes stinging from being too-long open, he blames that for the tear that purls down his cheek, leaving a single shimmering line in the filth of his face.

Certainly, it’s not Clint’s breathy, “Merry Christmas, sir,” just before he loses consciousness.

Definitely, it isn’t relief at discerning, moments later, the low thrum of a rescue chopper coming in just above the trees that ring their little half acre of hell.

*****

Christmas number five, Phil’s a third of the way through a fifth of scotch because no vodka had magically appeared, though he’d had no reason to expect it would.

Clint—Agent Barton’s gone, disappeared into the swelter of the Congo three months ago.  Ghostly echoes of him come in from Lagos, Ombada, Riyadh, Nasiriyah, and if Barton’s alive, he’s either gone rogue and is working in the red again, or he’s got the world’s worst travel agent.

That last observation might be the scotch, though the voice in Phil’s head sounds strangely like Natasha, who’s been notably silent on the subject of Clint’s disappearance.

And there he goes calling him _Clint_ again.

Phil remembers their Christmas in Colombia: the hot tackiness of Clint’s blood, how he’d had to scrub it from his cuticles and the way it had followed his heart-line along his palm to his wrist, as if seeking Phil’s pulse.

Remembers Clint’s trust as he’d sunk into darkness, emerging in thrashing, nasty dreams on the long ride home from Medellin.

Remembers Clint murmuring, “Phil, Phil,” until the medical tech working to break Clint’s fever had wordlessly handed over the IV bag and cold compresses and moved to a bench on the other side of the open deck.

That was two years and a lifetime ago, before Natasha had entered their lives and shaken up some of Phil’s expectations, expectations he wouldn’t allow himself to even acknowledge until it was far too late.  Until Clint was out of touch, maybe out of his life forever, well beyond the reach of Phil’s unwelcome desires.

A courtesy tap at the door comes seconds before the security code override, Natasha gliding inside, door closing silently behind her as she settles on the edge of the couch in Phil’s office.

“He’s alive,” she says, but Phil thinks it might be in the kind of tone a person uses when she can’t bear the possibility of loss.  Prior to Clint’s disappearance, Phil would have asserted that Natasha was only the lethal, sharp cold of one of her many blades.  

Now, he sees at the corner of her eyes a shadow, hesitancy born of long inurement to pain eroded away by a steady, insidious anxiety.

She’s worried for Clint. 

Phil’s terrified.

“You have no idea what he’s doing?”

Phil’s asked the same question a hundred times, but despite that he’s earned an impatient bark of a response, Natasha merely shrugs, that miniscule shifting of shoulders peculiar to Eastern Europeans, and then shakes her head, a cascade of red brushing her pale, narrow chin.

Recollecting his position, Phil settles Agent Coulson firmly around him and asks, “Did you need something, Agent Romanov?”

Something like a smile flirts with her mouth and then slips away.  She knows what he’s doing, pretending not to be afraid, and wants him to know that she knows.

Just as she wants him to understand why she isn’t calling him on his bullshit.

In fact, he understands much more.  In a painful flash, like a knife through the heart muscle, he feels the pinching certainty that Natasha trusts him.  Given what may have happened to the last person she knew who’d trusted Phil—disappeared, without a trace, except for bloody rumors of black work—he’s moved by the power of it and the responsibility.

This time, a tentative smile takes hold, wavers defiantly while she murmurs, “Merry Christmas,” and then rises and vanishes away, as fleetly and silently as she’d arrived.

He thinks he might have just been given a gift as rare as Clint’s had been that night in Kiev five years before.

Phil wonders, not for the first or even the hundredth time, what he did to make Clint take that gift back.

Sighing, he squares his shoulders and confronts the mission reports and personnel audits and myriad other tasks awaiting a single man who has dedicated his life to a cause that doesn’t much care for his individual needs.  Somehow comforted by the black and white symmetry of the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo dominating the top of each document, he settles into the habit of a lonely lifetime and ignores the creeping wrongness of the peaty dregs staining the bottom of his glass where the lightning fire of vodka should be.

*****

Arizona.  Mid-July.  Sweat baking into a second skin of itchy salt before he’d been out in the hide for more than ten minutes.  Flat stretches of super-heated grit turned to a mirage of taunting water as he’d squinted and tried to pick out the target.

Eons later, lips coated in Cooper’s blood, Phil had resisted licking them for the scant, copper moisture of it and squinted again through his scope.  He’d finished the mission, clusterfuck as it was.  He’d come back.

Concrete hard and unforgiving under his ruined boots, Phil nevertheless feels un-grounded, surreal, like the bland walls and anonymous corridors of HQ will prove illusory, the real world just a hell of unfinished red earth, broken only by the accusing finger of a tower rock pointing upward to an unforgiving sky.

He wants a shower and a stretch of uninterrupted sleep, and he’s thinking about how he’s only going to get one of those things when Hill intercepts him.

She starts to say, “Coulson, you need to—,” then, “Phil—,” more firmly, but the look on his face makes even the inimitable Hill take a step back, and she fades off through a doorway on his periphery as he heads for his on-site quarters to strip off the filthy field suit and try to drown himself with the lackluster water pressure of a lukewarm shower.

There’s a bottle of vodka on his bed when he comes through the door, and he takes that in in the seconds before his brain registers that the room is occupied, after which everything is amplified—a familiar scent almost forgotten.  A beloved smirk believed lost.  The sound of a smart remark cut short by what can only be Phil’s expression because he hasn’t mustered up any words to confront the specter of Clint Barton lounging against his desk edge, hands open against his thighs, as though to show that he has no weapon.

They both know that Clint can hurt Phil without ever laying a hand on him.

Phil takes in the purple swell of an imminent shiner under Clint’s left eye and realizes Clint must have run into Natasha before he came here.

He still can’t find words that won’t scorch his throat and suck the air out of the room between them, so he says nothing, suddenly unaccountably more exhausted than he was after thirty-six hours without sleep, no company but Cooper’s cooling corpse and the scorpions that scuttled around them on the deceptive sands.

“Sorry it’s late, Boss,” Clint attempts, nodding at the bottle.

With a casual gesture, as if he’s just reaching to smooth the coverlet, Phil grasps the bottle by the neck and hurls it toward the wall behind the desk.  It shatters, showering Clint in shards of glass, beading his hair and eyelashes with stinging liquor.

He doesn’t flinch, but he does nod.  “I deserved that.”

“Yes, you do,” Phil answers at last, correcting Clint’s verb tense as if that’s the most important thing he can do right now.

Clint’s hands turn, palms out at his waist, as if inviting further violence, surrendering to it, even.

Phil shakes his head wearily and gestures at the door.  “Get out,” he says, turning toward the bathroom, dropping his tack vest as he goes.

He expects the sound of boot-falls, the click of the closing door.

Instead, Clint’s hand startles him, and he pivots, running on spent adrenaline and sudden, annihilating anger.  He grabs Clint’s wrist, ducks under it, brings Clint’s arm up behind him, increasing the pressure until he feels the ball at the shoulder shuddering at the very edge of the socket.

Clint’s swallows a grunt.  Phil resists the urge to dislocate his shoulder; it doesn’t have the same satisfaction when he knows Clint could have slipped the hold at any time.  It’s a hollow victory and a bitter one.

“Don’t touch me,” Phil growls in soft, precise syllables, propelling Clint away from him.  “Get out.”  His tone this time brooks no argument, suggests that staying would be the very height of foolish hope.

“Phil,” Clint says, sounding young and old at the same time, frightened and grieving and lost.  It should move something in Phil, and maybe it does—maybe the clot in his throat that he swallows around, the tight fingers of dread clutching his ribs are signals that the numbness isn’t real, but Phil’s too tired, his anger having drained the very last of his energy.

He steps into the bathroom and closes the door behind him, leans against it with his breath held until he hears Clint’s retreat.

Only then does he let a shudder rack him, relief at Clint’s survival weakening his knees, making his hands shake as he struggles out of his filthy clothes, turns the faucet handles, steps into the shower.

When he emerges a few minutes later, towel around his waist and another one clutched in his hand to dry his hair, Clint is sitting on the edge of his bed beside an improbable second bottle of vodka.

Phil starts to say something, something incisive and awful, something that can’t be taken back or worked around.  Something forever.

But before he can let the acid burn away what’s left of them, Clint says, “Kiev,” so quietly that Phil is sure he heard wrong.  His uncertainty must register on his face because Clint says it again, clearing his throat and making a visible effort to meet Phil’s gaze.

“Kiev.”

Phil fumbles for the desk chair, swivels it around until he can sit down, heedless of the damp towel, the water still caught in the hair on his legs or the way the material gaps in a vee that leaves very little to Clint’s imagination.

Of course, Clint doesn’t have to imagine.

Phil had been showering then, too, eking cold comfort from the banging pipes of the tenement where they were holed up, awaiting word on extraction from their contact.

He’d heard Clint come in, listened for the outer door to close, and knew something was wrong by Clint’s heavy-footed walk, by the sound of him stumbling into the card table they’d scrounged from an abandon apartment across the hall.

He’d heard a bottle hit the ground and shatter, and he’d stepped out of the shower, wiped his gun hand on a towel, grabbed his weapon, and put his back to the bathroom door.

Phil hadn’t called out.  He’d held his breath and willed his heart to ease its pounding, straining around the blood sound in his ears to discern the threat level in the next room.

“Coulson,” Clint had growled, something off about his voice, and Phil had gone into the room fast, diving to one side, rolling into the partial cover of the one armchair in the room, aiming at Clint, who’d been standing, swaying in place, hands so wet with blood that it dripped steadily onto the grimy linoleum floor.

Tap.  Tap.  Tap.

It had splattered as it struck, flowers of gore spreading around his feet.

Setting his gun on the arm of the chair, Phil had risen from his crouch and moved toward Clint with his hands out, palms open, in the universal gesture for _I’m unarmed.  I won’t hurt you._

Clint’s eyes hadn’t been focusing on Phil, didn’t seem to recognize him, and that more than anything else had driven a cold spike of fear through Phil’s chest.

“Agent Barton, are you hurt?” 

He’d tried his Agent Coulson voice first, hoping it would break Clint from his fugue.

“Barton?” He’d tried a second time, easing closer, heedless of his nudity or the freezing cold floor beneath his bare, damp feet.

“Clint?” That time, he’d accompanied the soft word with a softer touch, just a ghost of a caress along Clint’s cheek, drawing his eyes to Phil’s face.

Clint had let go a sound that Phil had never forgotten, a terrible wounded noise, like a cornered animal finally giving up the fight.  He’d sagged and would have fallen had Phil not braced him at the shoulders, and then he’d sunk against Phil, shivering.

Clint had smelled of copper, thick and sharp, and of snow—flakes had been clinging to his hair, melting, darkening it as Phil bent his mouth to kiss the crown of Clint’s head and murmur soothing nonsense.

That hadn’t been his way—still wasn’t.  Agent Coulson didn’t mutter useless platitudes or pretend that there was comfort where there was none.

But Phil could no more have put Clint away from him at that moment or put professionalism between them than he could have walked out of the apartment naked and survived a frigid night in Ukraine. 

Clint had been shaking in his arms, fingers curled around Phil’s biceps, digging in, clinging like Phil was the only firm thing in a swirling chaos.

(He’d wake the next day with eight bruises, almost identical in diameter, a temporary mark that had made Phil’s face hot to see them in warped mirror of the dingy tenement bathroom.)

Unbidden, Phil’s hand had come up to curve around the nape of Clint’s neck, and his other arm had gone around Clint’s waist to bundle him closer, to tighten and hold, promising safety and comfort and a host of things Phil had had no business pretending he could offer.

They’d been thousands of miles from home, surrounded by enemy agents, out of options and utterly alone.  The mission had gone bad even before Clint had returned from what had supposed to have been a routine recon mission wearing another man’s blood like a second skin and shivering like his own blood was draining from him with every breathless hiccup he made against the still-damp skin of Phil’s neck.

Everything had changed when Clint had opened his mouth and ghosted his tongue tentatively along the thin skin stretched over Phil’s pulse.

Phil had had to bite back his own sound, a startling submission roaring through him, weakening his resolve.

But he still hadn’t known what their status was, hadn’t been able to fathom what could undo a man for whom Phil had formed an immutable respect in the eight months he’d been Clint’s handler.

“Clint,” he’d murmured, “Are they coming for us?  Do we need to move?”

Clint’s answer had been to gently fasten his teeth around Phil’s collar bone, savaging the skin and then soothing it with his hot, broad tongue.

Given his state of undress, Phil’s reaction had been impossible to hide, and a huff of hot air along his shoulder had only just anticipated the shift in Clint’s stance as he made enough room between them to wraps his cold, callused hand around Phil’s cock.

Phil had gasped at both the cold and the grip, hips bucking helplessly once before he’d gotten control of himself.

“Clint,” he’d warned, pulling himself away, loosening his grip around Clint’s waist so that he could look into Clint’s face. 

Grief had shadowed Clint’s eyes and clung grimly to the corners of his mouth.  He’d been pale, a faint green tinge suggesting incipient illness, but there had been recognition in his eyes.  He had been aware of himself and of Phil; he’d been awake to the implications of his gesture, their intimacy.

He’d reiterated that awareness by strengthening his grip and slowly, deliberately stroking the length of Phil’s cock, palm caressing the head and gathering a bead of moisture that clung there, easing his way back up Phil’s length until the back of his hand brushed the wiry hair at Phil’s root.

“Clint,” he’d tried again, desperation joining insistence in his tone.  Even the redoubtable Agent Coulson could be moved beyond reason by getting at last what he’d never permitted himself to consider wanting.  “Are they coming?”

Clint’s head had been angled down so that he could watch his hand stripping Phil of every ounce of his resistance, so the shake of his head brushed his wet hair against Phil’s chest.

He’d sucked in a breath, want singing through every pore, and pulled Clint’s face up for a punishing kiss that left them both panting and weak-kneed, stumbling like drunks to the sprung mattress they’d both been sharing, shoved into the least filthy corner of the cracked linoleum floor.

Phil had undressed Clint with a deliberate, precise haste that had left Clint panting and muttering a string of swallowed expletives, had retrieved his damp towel from the bathroom and used a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to clean the worst of it from Clint’s hands, arms, and neck, and then had pushed him down to sprawl on the bed, knees spread, hard cock curling up toward his belly, eyes fixed trustingly on Phil’s serious face.

He’d knelt between Clint’s thighs, bent himself in half to take Clint into his mouth, wringing a choked sound from him that had resolved itself into throaty grunts as Phil sucked and bobbed and swallowed around the head, lodged deep back in his throat, muscles milking Clint’s cock until he came in a juddering wreck, hands reaching for Phil’s hair, his cheek, his shoulders, clinging until he was utterly spent.

Only then, when Clint’s eyes had been at half-mast, watching with hungry approval Phil’s every move, had Phil retrieved their only lubricant—gun oil—and stripped his cock with a ruthless efficiency, striping Clint’s belly and pubic hair and wet, flaccid cock with his spend.

Then he’d reached over for the towel, now much the worse for wear, found a clean edge with which to wipe up the evidence of their passion, and laid down beside Clint, pulling a sleeping bag over them both.

Clint had hesitated only a moment before burrowing into Phil’s side and falling asleep while Phil kept watch, his gun in the hand not holding Clint against him while he slept.

When Clint had inevitably dreamed, whimpered shouts trapped in his sleeping mouth, Phil had soothed him awake with kisses and then listened while Clint had told him all about it:  About the human trafficker they’d been hunting, whom Clint had tracked to a restaurant on the ground floor of a three-story building, apartments and offices on the floors above. 

Voice low and controlled, Clint talked about the boy he’d seen bundled in through the alley door, his drugged state apparent from his slack mouth and unfocused eyes.

About the men who’d followed shortly thereafter, big greasy men with huge hands and ugly smirks, who’d passed money to the guard on the door and whose impassive face met their filthy leers with indifference.

Clint had said he didn’t remember killing the guard at the door or the one inside, didn’t remember climbing the stinking stairs to the second floor, following the sounds of piteous cries.  Didn’t remember kicking the door open or stepping inside, pinioning one man to the wall with an arrow through his throat and pulling the other off the struggling boy.

He’d apparently taken his time with the boy’s rapist, but he didn’t remember that, either.  It did explain the blood he’d been coated in, though.

Clint had remembered finding a robe and shoes for the boy and ushering him down the stairs and out the side door, had remembered taking him to a nearby church and leaving him with a wide-eyed pastor who had had the sense—or enough experience—not to ask any questions.

The next thing he’d been able to recall clearly was the feel of Phil’s warm, naked body against him, Phil’s strong and steady hand stroking the back of his neck.

Phil hadn’t asked why this particular mission had worked its way so far under Clint’s skin.  He’d read Clint’s medical reports, his psych evals when Clint had been admitted to S.H.I.E.L.D.  He knew enough to know not to ask any questions.  Instead, he’d pulled Clint on top of him and kissed him deeply and considered their options for escape.

Ultimately, they’d ended up returning to the restaurant to shut down the trafficking operation in a most permanent and fatal way, at which point Phil had walked through the apartment above and retraced Clint’s actions from the evidence, which the trafficker hadn’t yet had a chance to clear away.

Then he’d helped Clint drag the bodies to an old clawfoot tub, muscled them inside, made the usual cocktail of cleaning solvents they’d found under a sink in the restaurant’s kitchen, and dissolved the most immediate evidence of their actions.

Acrid stench of melting flesh pungent on the cold air, they’d gone door to door, knocking and then entering, finding only stripped fixtures and rat shit for their troubles.  It had been apparent that their suspicions about the building had been correct.  It had served only two purposes—as a front for the trafficker’s activity and as an apartment to offer potential buyers a preview of their purchase.

They had burned it to the ground, waiting until the fire trucks arrived before shouldering their backpacks and leaving the area in a car Phil had boosted from a long-term parking garage three blocks to the east.

Phil had lied by omission in his post-action reports, lied to Nick Fury’s face, lied during the mandatory psych evaluation. 

Lied to Clint when Clint had asked, “Can things go back to the way they were before?”

They never talked about it again, but here’s Clint now saying, “Kiev,” like it’s the cipher that can break the code of almost six years of silence, and Phil would be bitter about  how easy it is for Clint to get to him, that single word bringing back every scent and sound, every taste of Clint’s skin, every sensation of his hands and mouth and cock, everything, all of it, in details that bely Phil’s assertion to himself since Kiev that it hadn’t mattered that much, that it didn’t mean anything.

 _Would_ be bitter except for the sense that it’s all been inevitable, every Christmas since.

“What do you want from me, Clint?” he asks, wishing he was wearing his suit, not a towel and a blank expression meant to hide the treacherous hope making a mockery of his control.

“I want to make love to you,” Clint answers, hastening on before Phil can object in the fashion that Clint is clearly anticipating.  “I don’t have any right to say that to you.  I gave up that right years ago.  I threw it away—threw _us_ away—like it didn’t matter.  But it did.  It does.  It matters, Phil, and I’ve regretted it worse than anything I’ve ever done.  I know you don’t owe me anything, and I won’t ask again if you say no this time, but I’ve spent eight months wanting to put my mouth against your throat and feel your pulse under my tongue, and I promised myself if I survived, I’d tell you that, tell you what a fucking idiot I’ve been and how much I loved you—I’ve always loved you—and beg you on my knees if that’s what it takes…”

Phil makes a sound that he’ll deny until his dying day and that brings Clint up short.

“Don’t,” Phil says, though it doesn’t sound like him, voice weak and word garbled.  He clears his throat and tries again, but it doesn’t sound any better.

“Don’t what?” Clint asks, stepping closer, until he’s standing in the bracket of Phil’s knees.  “Don’t tell you I love you?  Don’t ask forgiveness?”

“Don’t beg,” Phil says then, a whisper that carries, and Clint sinks to his knees and tugs the towel apart at Phil’s waist and rests the weight of his palm in the hair at the base of Phil’s quiescent cock.  The muscles of Phil’s abdomen shiver under Clint’s touch, and he sucks in air so quickly that it chokes him and he coughs until the tears come to the corners of his eyes and spill over.

Clint brushes them away with the hand not pinning Phil in place.

“Can I?” he asks, and Phil is helpless to do anything but nod, words beyond him now, heart too big for his chest, clogging up his throat and forcing him to take shallow, short breaths.

When Clint wraps his hand around Phil’s cock and strokes slowly, eyes full of love and promise and heat fixed to Phil’s, all Phil can do is let his head drop back, baring his throat for Clint’s exploration.  Clint fulfills his desire, sucking a love-mark into Phil’s neck, soothing it with his tongue as Phil’s pulse speeds up.

Clint stops just as Phil feels the building pressure of climax drawing his balls up, and he makes a wordless sound of protest as Clint steps away, only to shed his clothes with remarkable efficiency and return, naked, to where Phil sits, hard and ready and waiting. 

Clint straddles Phil’s lap, reaches over him to retrieve something from the right-hand desk drawer.

Phil manages a breathy laugh, says, “You’re pretty sure of yourself, Barton,” and knows there’s something he should be upset about and things he should be asking about.  But Clint’s spreading his own legs, reaching between them to prepare himself, eyelids fluttering as he fucks himself on his own fingers, one, then two, then three, at last coating Phil’s cock before holding it steady and sinking down by slow degrees, inch by inch, until his body has welcomed all of Phil, impossibly tight and hot around him.

Clint shifts in Phil’s lap, rocks his hips, makes a startled sound of animal pleasure, and then repeats the motion, head flung back as he rides Phil’s cock, dragging it over the sweet spot inside of him.

“Fuck,” Phil breathes, looking up at Clint’s face, at the flush of red down his neck and across his chest, at the way his abdominal muscles bunch and shift when Clint fucks himself on Phil’s cock.

Then he can’t help but close his eyes as Clint speeds up, rocking harder and faster, fingers slipping into Phil’s mouth so Phil can make them wet, tongue swiping over the salty skin, Clint moaning at the sensation, motions growing arrhythmic as he says, “Fuck, close—I’m close, Phil.”  Clint pulls his hand out of Phil’s mouth to touch his own cock, and Phil puts a hand around Clint’s to help him along.

With a cry, Clint comes, and at the first pulse of Clint’s hot seed against his chest, Phil’s orgasm rips through him.

The air is sex-soaked when Phil takes in a deep, shuddering breath, cock slipping from Clint’s body.  He seeks out Clint’s gaze and finds him looking steadily back at him.

They remain like that for long minutes, and Phil sees on Clint’s face the toll the past months have taken on him, sees the weight he’s lost and the ghosts he’s gained. 

Sees an uncertainty lurking.  This, at least, Phil can ease.

“I love you,” he declares, not forgetting the complications of their relationship or the cost of Clint’s eight-month odyssey that will have to be paid by both of them for a long, long time to come.  Right now, though, Phil can’t care about what’s been.  He has to know what is.

Clint’s smile breaks sudden and beautiful across his care-worn face. 

“I love you,” he answers, and there’s no hesitation, no regret, nothing but love between them.  Then he laughs, a short, sharp bark of discovery.

“What?” Phil answers, mystified.

Clint nods at the floor around them.

They’re ringed in broken glass and spilled vodka, but somehow, impossibly, neither of them have cut their naked feet.

“Merry Christmas,” someone says, Phil or Clint, or maybe both, and then they’re kissing again, the slow, lingering, deep kiss of two people who suddenly and unexpectedly have irrefutable proof that miracles can and do happen, even—or maybe especially—to people like them.


End file.
